I have a network attached 1 Tb hard drive. It’s a white book, Western Digital “My Book World” device. I use it for backups. I needed to set it up to allow the backup scripts ssh access without a password. Here’s how I did it. The web interface was used in the normal way to create a user named my_backups. A share was set up automatically for this new user. The share name is the same as the user name - my_backups.

I use Java only when I have to, and only ever the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) - there is no way I’ll use Java for development work. I’d rather eat my own ear wax to be honest! Linux Mint 13 comes with OpenJDK installed, and a system I use which runs the fop FO Processor, barfs with a Java.Lang.NullPointer Exception if OpenJDK is used. The following is brief instructions on how to install Oracle’s java on Linux Mint.

This post is all about cloning an 11g database from one server to another using an RMAN active database clone. This is not being done for Standby Database purposes, only to duplicate an existing database onto another server. The physical structure on both servers is the same, some path names have been changed. Source Structure Database SID: msmdppr /srv/msmdp/oradata/msmdppr/ /srv/msmdp/flashback_area/msmdppr/ Everything hangs off /srv/msmdp/oradata/msmdppr and there are data, index, temp, undo, redo, ctrl, dbs, diag directories there.

Looking for the location of oraInventory on a server? Want to know where it is? Read on. There is a file, known to Oracle, which holds the location of the inventory. Of course, it isn’t in the same place on every server, but the ones I know of have it as follows: Linux: /etc/oraInst.loc HP-UX: /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc Windows: Registry at HKLM/software/oracle/inst_loc For any other Unix, you can find it (as the oracle or root user) with:

Have you ever found that the virtual hard drive attached to one of your VirtualBox VMs is getting too small? Want to know how to make it beigger? It’s simple. The steps are as follows: Disconnect the drive from your VM. The VM should be shut down and not snapshotted for this step. You can either use the VMs storage settings to disconnect the hard drive, or go to File->Virtual Media Manager, choose the correct hard drive, and click the release button.

Ever wanted to backup your Raspberry Pi’s SD card, but didn’t know who to ask? Me too. Read on …. The first thing to remember is that you should really always have a backup of your SD card. In theory every time you make a change, but in practice, it will be less frequently than that! I have had two cards corrupt themselves when I managed to lock my Pi completely, and the only recourse was to pull the power.

It’s a post-installation configuration that hasn’t been done. The /etc/sudoers file has the following section in it: In the default (unconfigured) configuration, sudo asks for the root password. This allows use of an ordinary user account for administration of a freshly installed system. When configuring sudo, delete the two following lines: 1 2 Defaults targetpw # ask for the password of the target user i.e. root ALL ALL=(ALL) ALL # WARNING!

TweetDeck for Linux, for example. Refused to start on me recently because it couldn’t find or access the location where I had saved my encrypted details. The problem is caused by Adobe Air not being able to find a running daemon for Gnome Keyring or KWallet, or a corrupted wallet database. Full details here http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/492/cpsid_49267.html - works for me! In my case, simply restarting KWalletManager worked fine. And restarting TweetDeck of course - it’s unable to pick up the fact that the wallet is available.

I’ve been using KDE4 on OpenSuse (11.4 currently) for some time and never had any problems. After a recent patch fix to the system, the volume control buttons on my Dell Vostro stopped responding. Normally pressing volume up or volume down worked instantaneously. Stop and go still worked fine, but not volume. What would happen is that the on screen indicator would appear after about 45 seconds or so - but the volume wouldn’t change until it did, then, it would go to maximum or minimum - depending on which button I’d been hammering for 45 seconds!

Using NetBeans (version 7.0.1) to develop Android applications and for no apparent reason, a project that worked yesterday won’t run any more. It compiles without error but refuses to run - whether or not the emulator is running - and doesn’t produce an error. Hmmm. In the source code for the main Java class (yes, I said Java - anyone who knows me will be having a fit right now!) the very first line is flagged with a red (ok, pink!

Software efficiency halves every 18 months thus compensating for Moore’s Law. Cheers.

Except, it’s not! WTF is it all about? You open a report, or a book and see a page with no text on it except this page intentionally left blank. Except, because of that bit of text, it’s no longer blank is it? So why do they bother? Does the author/publisher think we readers are too stupid to realise that a page is blank without being told? Is it because they think we might assume that somehow, the printing process has mysteriously failed for that one page in particular and we may be missing some highly important information?

Ever wanted to parse /etc/oratab but ignore all the comments and blank lines? So did I. Here’s how … I can’t claim all the credit for this, it is based on something I was doing plus a bit of “stolen” code from SLES. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 OLDIFS=$IFS IFS=: grep -v '^\(#\|$\)' /etc/oratab |\ while read ORASID ORAHOME AUTOSTART do ## Do what you like here with ## $ORASID, $ORAHOME and $AUTOSTART ## done IFS=$OLDIFS Cheers,